Dear Dad,

I have been thinking about you. I always do, I even wrote you a poem recently. I am today writing to deliver great news! I made a discovery so grand, the oil discovery in Turkana last year (You must have been to Turkana during the time when you were staying in Maralal) has got nothing on my discovery. Allow me to explain how it all unfolded … It was a boring Saturday afternoon and I was in my room, at home alone reading the Daily Nation. A special feature spread on a former MP-now a squatter suffering from diabetes and the fear of dying before getting compensated by the Kenyan government for having been in detention for five years while innocent and ostracized as among those who orchestrated the infamous 1982 coup, told by a brilliant writer Roy Gachuhi enthralled me.

While multi-tasking feelings of sympathy for the poor old man and marveling at how one writer could manage to balance the misery of a man with an impressive twist of a powerful literary style that could put me in the same room with the subject and then take me back into time to meet him again; somewhere along the story line I fell into the name of a former politician, Oloo Aringo and immediately wondered why that name echoed something inside me. I could not remember if I ever met Oloo Aringo while a young girl (probably 5 or 6 years old) but I should have. However, I can’t forget that this man was your confidant. That bleak memory immediately brought me a sudden vision. Inside that limbo world, I found myself stuck in a big white empty house with many mirrored doors. I had been running around tired and wanting out but in vain. And then all of a sudden there appeared a black door with a shinning knob made of silver. The joy of entering a new place was overwhelming and as soon as I walked through, I saw you sitting there smiling at me though silent. What happened made me afraid. I saw you through the newspaper, through the mention of your friend’s name. As freaky as that sounds, it  had to mean something. Immediately I knew and realized that you are the title of the book many people have urged me to write on, the one I have always wanted.

It would take the coincidence of me being engrossed in someone else’s work to know that all this time, you were the topic to write on I had been searching for. This must already sound so complicated, try explaining that to the writer whose work led me to the topic of you. Brave and hopeful; I drafted Roy an email first thing on Monday morning to commend him on his luminous literary style, and explain how through his article he lead me to you. That wouldn’t be easy from the look of Roy’s command and the kind of emails he must be receiving from all kinds of people. But he would respond to me the same day in a sharp, precise and sane tone, granting me a meeting next week to advice on my new-found discovery—the decision to write your biography. “Fortuitously, this is a journey that many people, some famous, others not, have undertaken and documented. You will not have a shortage of reference and inspiration,” he wrote to me in a powerful and encouraging email.

This year, the heavens have absolutely opened wide for me. People have been so good to me yet I have done nothing to deserve it. Life has been good, words wouldn’t even start to describe the grace and goodness of things around me. I now anticipate to dissect though the roads you treaded, places you worked and visited, people you touched, kids you brought up, the women of your life, the numerous letters you wrote to mum and just about anything that might have made you the kind of man you were up to the point where you passed on and then started living on in my dreams and beyond. Dad I pray that you bless me and my endeavor.